Like most people I strongly dislike what has happened to the Web. I love the Web, I grew up on the Web, I'll never stop being in love with it (particularly what it once was, and still can be - it's a choice that we get to make in how we build). This service is Web only. It's built to be super fast, so it uses no bloated frameworks. It uses no trackers. It uses no traditional analytics services. It doesn't require piles of personal info and I don't want to know who you are. It has no social media (no social login or buttons or trackers or accounts). The typical large content page weighs in at around 20-40kb in size and loads in 150-200ms with 8 requests, no cookies, 7kb of script, 4kb of css (I can push that further, but it's tight enough for now). There will be no images on the entire service (SEO punishment inbound) other than a small text logo. No ads. No pop-ups. No dark patterns like hiding content. It doesn't require users / readers to use JavaScript. All content is Creative Commons licensed.
The reason traditional VC can't be involved, is because they ultimately destroy all knowledge services they touch. I've been watching VCs (or private equity in the case of Answers.com; or giant corporations in the case of eg Verizon or IAC (eg about.com)) burn them to the ground for two decades now. To do it properly you have to prioritize what I call the knowledge motive, and absolutely minimize the profit motive. If you invert that value order, you'll destroy the service and you must inherently eventually betray the community that builds it up (this will happen to Stack Exchange; it has already happened to Quora). So this service is anti-commercialism; there is no business model going in; there will be no IPO; there is no exit plan; bare threads on expenses; it has to be run hyper thin, hyper optimized against cost and bloat. Doing that properly also helps keeps me independent. I have a ten year time frame allocated (including nearly two years into it so far), during which I'll push it forward and work on it no matter what happens, assuming I don't get hit by a bus or the equivalent. The ideal may or may not be to convert it to a charitable non-profit for long-lived purposes, assuming it works of course (I'm not assuming, I'm just doing it anyway because I want this thing to exist).
I've messed with building various knowledge services going back a decade. This hit me like a bolt of lightning back in April of 2018 and I began to flesh it out. It required a few revisions in concept before full build phase began. I had to take about three months in there to teach myself some new things I had to know to be able to build this to operate very inexpensively from day one and forward (I'm assuming it will never be flush via operations).
I'm probably going to do a Show HN this month or next for it and I'm going to begin showing it to some long-term Wikipedia editors that I know. Only a few people have seen it thus far, which breaks a good common rule - in this case I don't care, I'm not trying to find traditional product market fit, I don't have to desperately obey such concerns (it's solely my dime and my time), I built it because I wanted to, it will exist and persist because I want it to. There's a glorious freedom in that, and it might entirely fall flat initially or long-term - that's ok, I'm going in assuming the worst in terms of response; I'll see what kind of response it gets and decide on any adjustments.
I'm in this for the very long-term and plotted that way from the beginning. It's another reason typical VCs can't be involved, their horizon is short-term oriented. They'll destroy you trying to force you to get big fast, and it won't matter to them if they do it, even if the thing could have succeeded by growing slower. It's just one of many reasons why knowledge services are the anti-VC segment. If you ever see a knowledge service take on big VC, you already know the guaranteed outcome ahead of time: burned to the ground, forced liquidation for pennies on the dollar, or an exit sale before the VC runs out to continue funding the bloat taken on during the get-big-too-fast phase (and then the buyer runs it into the ground or shuts it down, hello Freebase).
So how will it stay afloat financially if it gains traction? Well, first, it's static cached text in the front, so it's dirt cheap to run at a very large scale. Beyond that I have some approaches that I think will work that I'll experiment with over time - it won't require much financially.